Cooking Blind

I was making some flapjacks the other day when my husband found me sitting on the kitchen floor with my left ear turned towards the open oven door. When he asked me what I was doing I explained that I was "listening to see if they were ready". He was amazed that I judge the readiness of food by what it sounds like; I was amazed that it has taken him 10 years to notice my way of cooking.

When I was a child I was scared of cooking. I was forever being told to take care of sharp knives and hot ovens by my understandably over-protective mother. And at school I remember being given a D- for Cookery because my efforts never looked as presentable as my peers' and my workspace always looked like a bomb had hit it.

Perhaps I would have been a more confident cook if my teachers had privileged the non-visual elements of cookery. Who cares what the food looks like as long as it tastes good? My cakes never look perfect but they are (almost) always delicious. And as someone who spends her life arguing against myths of beauty and symmetry, surely I should be the first to celebrate the 'different' appearance of my culinary creations.

Recently I have realised that despite cookery books' tendency to emphasise the visual nature of cooking through references to the desired colour and consistency, smell, touch, taste and hearing are in fact all I really need. I can tell whether a sauce is thickening by the way the spoon feels, and if a cake is ready by how springy it is. I listen for the sound of bubbling on the hob, under the grill and in the oven and always know if I've misjudged things when the smoke alarm goes off. Since I've started wearing glasses, they steam up horribly whenever I am leaning over a hot stove and my eyes water terribly whenever I peel an onion. I've tried all the old remedies, but have decided that chopping onions glasses-less and with my eyes closed is the only way to go. This is much easier and safer than it sounds: touch is all you need to feel the difference between skin and onion; in fact working out which layers to peel off with my fingers makes cooking a much more sensual experience. I've been chopping blind for a few months now and still have all my fingers intact.

Cakes and pasta are all very well, but meat is a different matter. I haven't yet worked out how to tell if a chicken is safely roasted without sighted help. And I'd worry about serving my children any kind of meat that I wasn't sure had been properly cooked. Much as I like to check the progress of my meals by having a quick nibble, food hygiene dictates that I shouldn't really snack on half-raw pork. So when I do cook with meat I tend to go for mince or well chopped pieces which I can be sure have been thoroughly cooked. I think I'll leave the more inventive meat cooking to others. After all, isn't that what restaurants are for?

Palindrome or Left of Centre?

I am a palindrome. Or rather, I have a palindromic name. A palindrome is a word or phrase that can be read backwards as well as forwards. I have always been very proud that Hannah is one of these magic words. Palindromes work because they are symmetrical. When you reach the mid-point of the word, it becomes a perfect reflection of itself. Symmetry is immensely satisfying. Think of the beauty of rainbows, butterflies, snowflakes, the human eye.

We usually expect the human face to be symmetrical too. The nose represents the mid point or the mirror line and symmetry dictates that the right and left sides of the face should be perfect reflections of each other. Traditional notions of beauty seem to prize symmetry extremely highly. And I once heard Robert Winston explaining that humans are most attracted by pleasingly balanced countenances: this is why the most popular children at school tend to be those with the most symmetrical faces.

But where does that leave those of us who do not have a reassuringly symmetrical appearance? My right and left eyes do not look or behave the same as each other. I know that this can look odd and make people I am meeting for the first time feel uncomfortable. I blame the frequently perfect symmetry of the natural world for this reaction.

But my asymmetry is not limited to my appearance. I have almost no sight in my right eye and do almost all of my looking out of my left. As a consequence, I do not see my nose as the centre of my face, but its edge. Indeed, I have never seen the right-hand side of my nose. My left-of-centre approach to life is emphasised by my left-handedness. My palindromic name sits uneasily with my bodily asymmetry. And I think this tension is an interesting reminder than symmetry is not always a good thing. Like the narrator of Suzanne Vega's 'Left of Centre', I relish my own marginality:

When they ask me
"What are you looking at?"
I always answer "Nothing much" (not much)
I think they know that
I'm looking at them
I think they think I must be out of touch.